In reckoning with the implications of Tuesday night’s American presidential election result, it behooves all of us who have publicly dreaded this dark moment to admit a few things plainly and honestly, while we are still able – especially those of us whose privilege it has been to declaim this dread from the platform of a newspaper column.

The phenomenon of the newspaper evolved over the past three centuries in tandem with the rise of liberal democracy, and both are in eclipse the world round. A complex malaise associated with the stratospheric reach of digital technologies is withering newsrooms and shuttering newspapers everywhere. The old business model is broken.

Only two of the 100 largest-circulation newspapers in the United States – the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Florida Times Union – endorsed Donald Trump. The Democratic party matriarch Hillary Clinton won the endorsement of 57 newspapers, many of which were staunchly conservative and Republican. It didn’t matter.

Over the past 15 years, the number of proper journalists employed full-time in the United States has declined by half, to roughly 30,000. In the meantime, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google News and a plethora of “social media” platforms has accelerated the diffusion of fake news. The Kremlin propaganda arm RT News was as significant an influence in the shouting that produced Trump’s victory as any of the legacy media. Wikileaks, the Kremlin’s clearing house of disinformation and information warfare, was more relevant in directing the course of events than the editorial board of the New York Times. Facebook has tried and failed to keep fake news out of its newsfeed algorithm. Everything is broken.

It is not true that “the people are always right,” that saccharine piety politicians routinely utter upon losing elections. But neither is it true – as this election more than any other in the history of the American republic has proved – that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, because the government always gets back in. The American people voted against their system of government this week. While Clinton may have won a majority sliver of the popular vote, Americans have revolted against their own political culture, against the entire American political class.

Last week, a New York Times/CBS News poll revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans were disgusted by their own politics, and held no hope that either presidential candidate could put things back together again. Eight in 10 respondents said the election campaign left them repulsed, rather than enlivened. Pollsters get things wrong, especially when margins of error in the four- to five-per-cent range are not properly interrogated. But you have to work really hard to misread a poll with 80 per cent of respondents saying the same thing.

On Tuesday, long before the final votes were counted in the wee hours, a Reuters-Ipsos poll of 10,000 Americans who had just cast their ballots found that 76 per cent of respondents agreed with the proposition that “the mainstream media is more interested in making money than telling the truth,” and 72 per cent agreed that “the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.”

It is all very well for Democrats to console themselves with the might-have-been that the mildly socialist contender Bernie Sanders could have turned things around and beaten Trump at his own game. But it can’t be denied that Clinton was far and away the best candidate available to persuade and cajole voters into sticking with the neoliberal global system overseen by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This brings us to the hardest thing of all for any of us to admit.

The system is rigged. It is rigged, and it is rigged particularly against American working people.

From Hollywood to the Upper West Side, Barack Obama’s legions of sycophants and acolytes swaggered and boasted, all for nought, that the Trumpist rallying cry to Drain the Swamp and to Make America Great Again was an occluded inducement to bigotry and white supremacy, and that America has never been so great.

But that is not how a great many Americans see things.

The median average income of Americans last year, adjusted for inflation, was 2.4 per cent less than it was in 1999, 17 years ago. On Obama’s watch, a weird complex of consultants, lobbyists, cable-show commenters, think-tankers and professional insiders of one stripe or another around Washington, D.C., has ballooned. Factory workers – once the driving force of the American economy – are now outnumbered by government employees.

It was on Obama’s watch that the global order that emerged following the Cold War, enforced by American cultural, political and military hegemony, shrank away and withered. NATO’s second-largest standing military force is Turkish, and Ankara is now a police state fully entrenched in the Russian-Iranian orbit. Beijing has been allowed to throw its weight around Southeast Asia with such open hostility to the United States that the Philippines, the oldest and largest American ally in the region, has been pulled into China’s orbit by a thug-strongman president who has happily announced his country’s “separation” from the United States. The ayatollahs in Tehran now control wealth, territory and a geopolitical dominion the Khomeinists of 1979 only dreamed about.

All the celebrity journalists, the movie stars, the avant-garde humanities professors and the “progressive” holdovers from the Woodstock Generation have won everything they’d wanted: an America in retreat, humbled and shamed. This is the delightfully multipolar world we’ve all been waiting for. That is what a generation of minimum-wage barista millennials are left to contend with.

White supremacist and Klan wizard David Duke is deliriously happy, conceding all victory to Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, the toast of the radical chic, the hero of Michael Moore, Bianca Jagger, John Pilger and the rest. Al-Qaida theologian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi rejoices, seeing in Trump’s victory the final “disintegration” of the United States. Richard Spencer, a figurehead of the white supremacist American right, is not wrong: “The Alt-Right is more deeply connected to Trumpian populism than the conservative movement. We’re the establishment now.”

In that Reuters-Ipsos poll from Tuesday, 75 per cent of respondents agreed that “America needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” A “strong leader,” then, is what American culture has wrought.

History repeats as farce, and the Age of the Gargoyle has dawned. God help us all.

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